Friday, July 13, 2012

Now all I need is a horse with no name.

The watering ban starts today in drought-stricken Indianapolis. The couple of neighbors who have been dragging out the sprinkler daily are going to have to watch their grass turn brown in order to keep the pumps in Eagle Creek Reservoir from sucking air. The local Catholic high school cheerleading squad had to ixnay their fund-raising car wash, too. (I was going to try to work a pun involving the word "habit" in there, but nun came to mind.)

The dropping water levels in all the creeks and lakes are causing problems for boaters, and no doubt offering new slalom challenges for water skiers.

Bearing in mind that Indiana has been settled longer than the hairy-chested west, and our state seal shows a guy chopping down all the trees and scaring the buffalo away, we don't get great big raging fires in droughts like they do in, say, Colorado, where giant mountainsides blaze for days, but we did have a tidy, unassuming little lawn fire up in Amish country. I hope they saved the potato salad.

I'm trying to keep looking on the bright side of this drought. For me there are several immediate benefits. I've only mowed the lawn twice this summer. The work on the new IN-25 is progressing very nicely, which will probably cut twenty minutes off my daily drive. The toilet hasn't run slowly from the septic tank being full.

Sure, we had some fires out here in CO (was almost surrounded for a while there with fires to the east, west, and south), but you don't want to know how cool and rainy it's been lately. Hopefully some of that will make it your way, if it can make it over the Continental Divide.

Over here in the UK we have had a very dry winter so the water company's declared a hose pipe ban and shortly after it started to rainand it has not stopped yet,no water shortage no hose pipe ban just too much bloody water and flooding!

With regard to Wild Fires; just wait till harvest season and everywhere there is an extremely dry corn field (pretty much the whole state) and we will have a situation that will dwarf that of the west.

We've already had one field fire in White County that took out 80 acres of wheat stubble and it was caused simply by a disc blade sparking off a field rock.

Now just wait till we get a bunch of pick-ups with hot cat converters, combines with bad bearings (dropping molten metal) and more disc blades sparking off ever more field rocks in these same fields, add in a good 30 mph wind and Hoosierland will have every homeowner and small community down wind shaking in fear.

And none of these scenarios take in the prospect of all those funky wind-mills in Benton, White and Tippecanoe counties catching fire when their transmission oil reaches combustion temperatures. (Something they don't want to talk about, but have you noticed the size of the radiators at the back of the 'house'?)

(Bad thing about the possiblity of windmill fires is NO fire department in this area has the equipment to even REACH the unit or 'house' mounted 135' up in the sky. They've already decided to let them burn down. Which with our present drought should make life extremely interesting for more than a few folks.)

I guarantee you more than a few in the local fire fighting services are thinking about and not sleeping well at night because of the above...

Something tells me they will find a way to blame firearms, at least in the media. That's what they blamed the Colorado fires on until it was determined otherwise. Gun owners, guilty until proven innocent. Then still guilty.

Frank, Warren county had a couple fires along SR28 east of Attica yesterday. From what I could tell, cigarette butts tossed out a window would be a good guess. Nary a farm implement to be found.(Indiana's butt toss law has been just as effective as the texting ban.)